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Tea Party Hero ‘Joe The Plumber’ Takes A Union Job

Samuel Wurzelbacher, touted as “Joe the Plumber” by vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, announced Sunday that he’s now a member of the United Auto Workers Union and has a job with Chrysler Group, LLC.

“Is a teabagger welcome in a union shop?” Wurzelbacher, 40, asked on his blog. “Can a conservative work safely and soundly in a union environment – in a shop filled with union workers, activists, voters and life-long supporters of the Democrat Party? You betcha.”

“Yes, I have a website that puts out conservative news. Yes, I am part owner of a gun company. Yes, I’m a Republican who was cast into the limelight for having the temerity to confront Barack Obama on the question of redistributing wealth… But I’m a working man and I’m working,” wrote the Ohio native.

Wurzelbacher said he was required to join the union.

“In order to work for Chrysler, you are required to join the Union, in this case UAW. There’s no choice – it’s a union shop – the employee’s voted to have it that way and in America that’s the way it is,” he added.

He said on the fourth day of his orientation at Chrysler, he was taking a smoke break when someone called him a “teabagger.”

“Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Democrats and liberals, who are supposed to so tolerant and enlightened regarding homosexuals have for three or four years now, have been using a gay slur to describe people who they think are associated with the Tea Party,” he wrote.

Despite being bullied he’s sticking with the United Auto Workers Union.

“I am happy that Chrysler has given me a job, I only hope the UAW lets me keep it," he said.

As far as his conservative views clashing with his new union digs, he says he actually supports unions as long as they’re private.

“But there’s a big difference between private unions and pubic unions and I have never made it a secret that I do not like public unions because taxpayers are never properly represented at the bargaining table,” he wrote.

Author Garret Keizer predicted this kind of conservative cognitive dissonance over unions in an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times: "The two-labors fallacy rests on an even shakier proposition: that profits exist only where there is an accountant to tally them."